Know Your Duluth Liquor Laws!

DuluthPint

Over the next week or so, Zenith City Online is publishing five separate stories on the history of Duluth’s liquor laws so that voters and elected officials can better understand the historic context of the issue they face in this November’s citywide referendum. I have included links to all five stories below so you can read them now. This issue is embedded in misinformation and myth. In fact, former Mayor Herb Bergson recently told Zenith City Online he vetoed a 2007 City Council resolution to request the repeal of the 1891 law because he believes that all of Lakeside and Lester Park was a gift to Duluth from the philanthropic Marshall sisters (Julia and Caroline) and that Myrtle Marshall, who fought to keep the law in place in 1973, was one of those sisters—none of which is true. So here’s a chance to catch up on Duluth liquor history so you can make a well-informed decision on this issue.

5 Comments

Herzog

about 9 years ago

I can't even imagine what that would be like, a new establishment in Lakeside Duluth that serves beer and wine?  The tectonic plate would slide and mothers with babies will fall into the earth.

Paul Lundgren

about 9 years ago

This is what the ballot question will look like, so we can practice voting:

Sale of Intoxicating Liquor in Duluth's Lakeside and Lester Park Neighborhoods

DaVe

about 9 years ago

Herb Bergson vetoing liquor sales anywhere is ironic in the extreme.

http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_25575221/ex-mayor-duluth-superior-gets-jail-third-dwi

The Big E

about 9 years ago

Great work.  I really wanted to explore some of this back in 2008 but never got very far with it.  I'm a little disappointed you didn't find a perfect smoking gun document from a nativist teetotaller at the center of it all, but the work overall looks great and constitutes a real contribution to an important present-day issue.  

For my part, I'll continue to emphasize the circumstantial connection between the Lakeside liquor ban and the 1893 wave of enthusiasm for the hysterically anti-Catholic American Protective Association , both seeming expressions of nativist/Protestant cultural paranoia.

Tony D.

about 9 years ago

Thanks, E! I wish I had thought to include that APA info. Dick Huddelson's "Down by the Ore Docks," to which you have linked, is a great source not just to understand local labor history, but the hierarchy of American society 100+ years ago.

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